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Nielsen report. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody, welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast and new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here back for another episode.
Today, I think I am possibly the most excited for this guest of all of our guests this season.
Because as you know, we love an evidence based background, we love an informed guess we love an actual scientific opinion in this space.
And I think this person does all of those things.
So we have Dr. David Rosmarin, who is a associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and the founder of the Center for Anxiety, which provides is it services to over 1000 patients a year, I think so he is incredible.
He works a lot in obviously mental health, and a lot around anxiety.
And he's also been featured in a number of amazing journals that we use on this podcast, all the time.
He's here today to talk about people's anxiety, their experience of anxiety, particularly in their 20s.
So welcome. Thanks so much for having me on your show.
It's a great honor and pleasure to be here.
Yeah, I'm really, really excited.
Actually, I'm super pumped because I feel like maybe we should start firstly with letting you introduce yourself before I jump straight into my line of questioning maybe talk about your journey to where you are now.
Why you took an interest in this particular area of research this particular field as well.
Sure. Well, I myself have definitely struggled with a deal of a good deal of anxiety over the years, and learning to deal with that, especially somebody who helps others and who does research in this topic.
And who now, you know, my clinics, like you mentioned, we're servicing over 1000 people every year has been so positive.
It's been such a blessing for me to be able to have these challenging experiences.
I'm not going to say that anxiety is fun.
It is not nobody likes it.
It's so uncomfortable.
It's the kind of thing that we want to get rid of.
But the times in my life when I've had that have made me so able to connect with my patients and in some ways more resilient.
And I actually think today that anxiety can be a great catalyst for growth and for thriving, if we use the right tools and approaches in order to get there.
Yeah, I love that. I think often people talk about these things without having a personal experience with them, which can be so frustrating.
But I do think that that shared vulnerability, that shared experience is a bit of a unifier, a bit of a superpower.
You know, I appreciate that.
Let me ask you a question.
Have you ever met anybody who didn't have anxiety before?
It's so funny that you asked me this, because I think I've met a couple, and one of them is actually my partner.
And he, I'm gonna, I'm gonna share all here.
He's got a pretty stressful job.
He's a he'll be up till 2am never.
And I think it's thinking in Yang, right?
But in general, I know you are you're expecting a different answer.
It's very few from far between the individuals who have never had anxiety before.
And I think one of the biggest issues, and one of the reasons anxiety gets out of control is that often we judge ourselves and we get very upset when we start to feel anxious, as opposed to realizing that this is a very human emotion.
This is the kind of thing that's going to happen to the vast majority of people except for your partner.
And everyone, almost everyone at some point is going to butt up against these feelings, these sensations, and they're uncomfortable.
We want to get rid of it.
But, you know, learning to grapple with it and to parlay that into positive ways in our life is really the name of the game as opposed to trying to squelch it and combat it.
I think that really personally relates to me as well, the times I've been most anxious is when I've been asking myself to be least anxious.
When I've really been suppressing that feeling because it, you know, wasn't comfortable.
It wasn't necessary at the time.
I felt like it was interrupting other things in my life.
But I do kind of want to just quickly start at the basics because I feel like when it comes to anxiety, there is somewhat a bit of misinformation around there.
Sometimes people, you know, I think people love to self -diagnose, people love to throw terms around like I'm just so, you know, I've just got such bad anxiety.
I've got such bad OCD.
I've got such bad social anxiety, social phobia, whatever it may be.
So can we just quickly strip back to the basics?
What exactly is not just anxiety, but some of the distinctions within the broader anxiety space, you know, perhaps between a panic disorder, social anxiety, generalized anxiety, not everyone obviously experiences it the same way.
Absolutely. Yeah. If you strip it down when you want to define anxiety, you really have to start with fear.
Now fear is a healthy emotion that everybody, almost everyone, is programmed with, which involves adrenaline.
Adrenaline gets pumped into your bloodstream the minute you perceive a threat.
And the fear response, otherwise known as the fight or flight response, is a healthy adaptation, which helps you to survive.
So you'll either flee or fight or freeze if you're in a certain situation and you're more likely to survive those situations.
Babies, neonates, who do not have a fight or flight response, are usually, they usually don't survive.
They usually will not survive beyond 30 days.
It's a neurolog, it's a neurolog, it's a neurological problem.
In fact, people don't have that.
Now, what's anxiety?
Anxiety is the exact same thing.
It shares the same brain circuitry.
It shares the same neurobiology as fear.
However, there's one key difference.
It's a false alarm.
So fear would be a real alarm.
Like, oh no, I really have to get out of the way of this bus, which is careening towards me down to city street.
And anxiety would be, I'm in this social situation and I feel afraid my fear response is going off, but it's unnecessary.
Now I want to clarify.
In other words, like I said, it's a false alarm.
So I want to clarify, you are going to have false alarms.
You're going to have them sometimes.
Sometimes in your kitchen or wherever it is, you're going to have, your smoke alarm is going to go off and that's good.
That actually indicates that the batteries are working, the circuitry is working and you have the protective factor in there, in place, the protective mechanism in place, that if there were a fire, it would wake you up and it would save your life.
That's much better than what's deadly with the smoke alarm is batteries, when the batteries die or when you don't have it.
So anxiety just shows you that it's actually working, but it's a misfire of the fear system.
Can I ask you a question?
Because there's, which is kind of going back a little bit, but it's something that people ask me about all the time, since obviously, fight, flight and freeze response, parasympathetic and the automatic nervous system.
No, parasympathetic and it's sympathetic.
What about the foreign response?
Have you spoken, do you know much about this new addition?
Well, the newest addition has really been freeze, that has historically been ignored in the last several years in the scientific literature, that's been brought up, especially in the context of sexual assault.
There was some recently, some New York Times pieces about that and a couple of high level scientific pieces about people freezing during sexual assault, as being a part of the fear response.
I don't know about form.
What can you tell me about it?
Yeah, well, it's interesting that you don't know about it, because now I'm thinking that perhaps I'm not getting it from the best sources.
But the form response is basically mainly to do with, I think, social anxiety, where you feel, obviously, that false alarm that someone perhaps is going to reject you, someone doesn't like you, someone is going to do you harm in a social capacity.
And instead of running away, instead of obviously fighting the person, both of which would be socially inappropriate, freezing might actually hurt your case more.
You've formed. So you overly compliment them, you've kind of make yourself seem quite subservient.
And like they are in control.
So it's interesting that perhaps this isn't coming up as much in your space, because maybe it's, I don't know, the freeze response, I understand the foreign one is one that I think I don't understand as well, because it doesn't seem as natural to me.
As part of a fear response, it feels more like an intentional behavior, rather than an automatic behavior.
I'll tell you what I think is really going on there.
In some ways, the person that you know, fight the fight response is when you're doing something in order to ward off anxiety.
The flight response is when you're running away and you're escaping.
So it actually in some ways is under the category of the fight response, I understand it's not fighting, because you're not fighting against the person.
But really, it's in the category of are you doing something positive in order to tamp down your anxiety and to deal with it?
Or are you doing are you withdrawing from a situation, which would either be in the form of freezing and its extreme force form or in the form of fleeing or withdrawal.
So form is a socially appropriate way of trying to engage people.
And yeah, that could definitely be mediated.
Social anxiety is one context, one way in which anxiety manifests.
Perhaps particularly for young people, I'll even I'll even I think that is the case.
I think generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety, social anxiety is something I get questions about all the time.
But something else I want to speak about.
Because like, one thing you talk about is how, and you spoke about this in your Washington post -Washington Journal article, well, so your journal article, yeah.
And it was super fascinating.
It's how perhaps our experience of anxiety has changed in recent decades, but also the approach to diagnosing anxiety has also changed.
You know, previously, obviously, in decades long gone, we really only had like kind of the broader term of like neuroses.
And people would experience you know, a great deal of stigma and discrimination.
There wasn't really a system for dealing with this pattern of of symptoms, this pattern of behaviors, this pattern of tendencies.
Nowadays, we have that side we're so much more accepting, we're so much more aware of what this is.
But what does that change?
Has it had any consequences now that perhaps the bar has been lowered, the threshold is lower?
Yeah, I believe there have been some unintended consequences of our greater literacy of mental health.
And I think on the one hand, it's been a great thing.
Like, as you say, you know, we have more technologies today, we have more solutions.
On the other hand, there is an insidious message that your generation has, that had I grown up with this, I would have had crippling anxiety.
And that message is that you need to feel good all the time, you need to look good all the time, you need to be high achieving, you need to be hidden to the nines, you know, everything's got to be perfect.
And that is just not going to happen.
It's, if you're expecting perfect equanimity and perfect happiness, you know, you're going to be disappointed.
And then the minute you start to feel anxious, then you're judging yourself, you're nervous that something's wrong, you're comparing yourself to everybody else.
And then you're just going down the tubes, it actually literally releases more adrenaline, when you perceive anxiety as a threat, which by from a biophysical standpoint, increases your anxiety.
I think this is the core of the anxiety epidemic today, is that we have bought in and sold.
We have sold this message, especially to younger generations, that you need to feel good all the time.
It's a lie. It's just not going to happen.
And the more we can accept that distress is part of life, the better we're the more resilient we can be.
Um, and the better, uh, position we are to be able to handle, uh, normal adversity.
So I, I completely agree with that.
I think that the pressure to be exceptional is significant, is something that every single person in this generation would tell you about.
So do you think that is specifically cultural or social, or are there other factors, the one that I always think of and perhaps it does play into an environmental cause, environmental causes, the rise of social media and certain technologies, which have made it so much easier to compare yourself to
others, so much easier to see everything that's absolutely terrible in the world.
Do you think that has a role as well?
It does. It definitely does.
I think it worsens trends within countries.
But if you look between countries, it's different like our levels of anxiety in Europe are substantially better than they are in the United States.
And in Middle Eastern countries, it's even better.
And even in India, where it's very common for people to use social media, um, people's anxiety is not quite as bad.
And the reason why is because in many cultures, I don't know about Australia, unfortunately, I don't know very much about it, but I know in the United States, social media is used to replace in -person social engagement.
That's usually not in Mediterranean countries, it's not usually like that in the Far East.
It's not as much. There's still social engagements, which occur.
And those are complicated.
You have to get on a subway, you have to, you know, deal with some of the, I don't know, they have bad breath, you have to, you know, see somebody at that party who you don't like, you have to, you know, it's more, you can't just shut off the conversation.
And if you don't look good, you're still there.
Like if someone spills coffee on you, like you're, you're at the party, like you're, you're, we have to deal with those, you're there.
You can't just shut it off or like, you know, go to your cupboard and then change and then come back on with a pixelated image.
So all of those are great for building resilience and something that at least in the United States, we are not doing very well.
Hmm. That's really interesting because I think that it's massive.
In Australia, I literally just finished a project for Medibank called We Are Lonely.
And it talks about how social media has reduced that sense of connection.
But the other thing that I find, this is like a personal rant that I have all the time, is our society is kind of moving towards a place where we don't have community anymore.
You know, previously we used to, a lot of, you know, groups were quite religious.
You know, you used to go to Sunday church or the, you know, you used to be able to pop over to your friend's house and now that's kind of replaced with being able to have those interactions online.
And so I really kind of agree with what you're saying in the sense that you no longer get that exposure to perhaps the everyday stresses that you can engage with in media.
Is that kind of cool?
A hundred percent. Relationships are messy.
You know, they're all messy and the people who you love the most and you feel the connect, connected with the most and the people who you're going to feel the most elated with and most excited with are also probably the people who are going to drive you the most insane.
That's usually the way it goes.
Yeah, I think people need that reminder coming up to Christmas.
Honestly, that's incredibly contextually relevant.
Now, of course, like if we're talking about trauma and if we're talking about, you know, actually dangerous situations and, you know, people who are sociopaths, like I have no tolerance for that.
And, you know, I'm not saying that we should subject ourselves to actual danger, but, you know, the people who I know who are the most connected with others also put up with a lot of garbage.
And I see that as a strength.
I see that as a strength and one that we don't really talk about very much.
I also think it's this interesting thing where it's like you can still interact with those people with boundaries, like, you know, not completely withdraw.
I think this is a completely different topic we're getting onto.
I'm just trying to pick your brain for all that it's worth.
But I wonder. Well, it's related to anxiety because when we are dealing with people, you know, those people who need those boundaries, there's that sense of inside of us, like, should I put up a boundary?
Do I just walk away?
Do I tell them off?
Like, and that creates a lot of anxiety.
Do we actually face that anxiety and deal with the issue?
Or do we just walk away?
And I think in our culture, when we are trying to cultivate our emotional experience on a minute by minute basis, the minute I start to feel anxious, I'm like, I'm not dealing with this.
I don't think that's healthy.
I don't think that's the way we're meant to be.
Learning to have boundaries and to enforce those boundaries continuously is a great, great skill.
It's not easy, but it's an important skill that I don't think we practice enough.
I think it's also this trend of conflict aversion as well, like wanting to avoid all kinds of conflict.
I've seen that in my own life, perhaps that people pleasing tendency as well, which I think our generation has a lot more of not to offend.
I think there is a lot more people pleasing in for people, for folks in their 20s than there was when I was when I was 20.
Yeah, absolutely. But I want to ask you this question because this is the thing, I think, kind of the main part of the sandwich here that I'm super fascinated by, which is how do you think that our approach to treating anxiety has changed?
And I'm going to say my fascination with this, you know, with this philosophy that you have with perhaps your opinion on this is quite selfish of me comes from a personal place.
It's, you know, the over medicalisation of anxiety.
Now, I was diagnosed with anxiety when I was quite young.
It's been a constant in my life, as it sounds like it has been in yours.
And when I was 19, I went on Lexapro, which is kind of a dual anxiety, depression medication was also like very quickly prescribed Valium, which I no longer use.
And so I guess by way of my actions, I've kind of benefited from this more medical, biomedical approach.
But you say that we can do things differently.
And obviously, this is not me asking you for personal medical advice.
That would be entirely inappropriate.
But more in the sense of like, what does that mean?
What is this, this different approach?
How can we do this differently without perhaps taking a pill that sometimes people think is going to be this miracle, this one thing that is going to change their life?
Great questions. First and foremost, I'm not against pharmacology in any way.
And I do see I would say more than 50 % of my patients use pharmacology use medicine, psychiatric medications.
And I'm a supporter of that, as long as it's taken with certain intent.
Now, I don't know what you were told when you were 19 and put on Lexapro.
But the fact that you were put on Lexapro first, and Valium second, indicates that probably it was something along the lines of I'm going to take this in order to reduce my anxiety so I can manage day to day and be able to overcome it.
If the Lexapro if your intent was I need to get rid of these feelings, and I cannot have them ever again.
Firstly, that doesn't work.
There's no medication that will take away your anxiety, because if it could, it would take away your fear response, which would actually be maladaptive, that would not be healthy for you at a neural level at an emotional level, behaviorally or in any other way.
We need people's fear systems to be in place so that you can be protected if you need it.
So we're not going to strip that down.
You know, there would be catastrophic consequences if that were the case.
But what can be done is to tamp it down a little bit so that a person has enough anxiety that they can tolerate.
Sometimes people's anxiety gets so high that they just cannot tolerate it.
They can't use it to thrive in a positive way in their lives.
So we need to pharmacologically reduce it to a regular level.
Now, benzodiazepines, Valium, Ativan, Valium, Klonopin, and the like, are completely different.
They work on a different brain system called GABA.
And what those do is they sort of immediately reduce your anxiety.
Xanax is your classic one, right?
They immediately reduce your anxiety.
Now, often people are given those as a first line treatment.
And I do not think that's in general.
In general, I don't think that's a wise practice.
I don't think that's a wise medical practice, because what ends up happening is people assume the minute I feel anxious, they're taking this fast -acting medication.
Lexapro is slower acting over time.
So it'll reduce your anxiety over a period of four to six weeks to a reasonable level.
And then you can reduce it over time if you want.
You can reduce your dose and then tolerate higher levels.
With benzos, it's a different game.
And that approach is really in some ways reinforcing the idea, I shouldn't feel anxious.
I don't want to ever feel anxious.
I have to get rid of this anxiety or something catastrophic will happen.
And all of those messages just sensitize us further often.
And I've seen this in hundreds of cases where people were told by a pharmacologist, you need to take this Xanax or whatever it is in order to cope with their anxiety, it will take it away and it doesn't.
And then they feel even worse about themselves the next time their anxiety goes higher and they end up on three, four or five medications.
Then, you know, it can get very complicated very quickly.
I find that very personally relevant.
That made a lot of sense to me.
I think it's also something I realized I used to have a really terrible fear of flying, terrible claustrophobia.
And that's why I used Valium.
And you know what? The fear response was not there.
But the level of avoidance that I had towards the activity increased like crazy because I became more fearful of that fear response, right?
Because I was teaching myself that it was so dangerous, that it was so scary, that I was so unable to cope, that I needed to be taking this medication at high doses.
What did you think would happen?
What did you think would happen if you just let your anxiety go?
Oh, I had some crazy irrational fears.
That's the other part about, you know, I think anxiety, it's quite irrational, right?
And it was, you know, if I was on this plane, and I wasn't taking Valium, I was gonna have a panic attack.
And I was gonna try and rip open the doors of the plane.
Because I was so scared.
I was like, is this a possibility?
Could I completely?
Could I seriously hurt other passengers on board, or I think worrying about embarrassing myself.
And then I think I examined the fear further.
And I was like, I know the thing I always say for people to do is this, so what?
So you have a panic attack on the plane, so what?
So I'm going to embarrass myself.
So what? I think the thing that I realized in that and you say this, and you said it before, and I love, love this phrase, you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
How do you think we get there?
Because being uncomfortable is not something that we particularly enjoy doing.
Nobody likes it. But it's gonna happen sometimes.
And we do have to get used to it.
Now, the question is how much discomfort can we when we listen, I feel anxious throughout, I wouldn't say on a weekly basis, certainly a couple times a month, something comes up that makes me feel viscerally uncomfortable.
And when my stress level is high, I'm more likely to have that.
I'll tell you what I do.
I'll be very autobiographical here.
I lean right into it.
I'm feeling terrible right now.
What am I upset about?
And I bring it on. I think right towards it.
And if I'm feeling, if something makes me feel more uncomfortable, I will gravitate even more towards it.
I'll talk about it in great detail with people, get it off my chest, embrace it, let the fear wash over me.
It is, it's sort of like ripping off a band -aid.
Yeah. Right. Just like we're gonna do this really freaking hard and it hurts.
It really hurts. It's bad.
But it, well, I'll tell you what ends up happening when you lean into it is this, what we talked about before, the parasympathetic nervous system.
You have wiring and you have chemicals inside of you, which will calm you down.
Okay. We see over a thousand patients a year in my practice.
How many of them have had a panic attack that lasted more than 90 minutes ever?
I'm sure it's zero.
Zero. The number is zero.
And my colleagues who have similarly sized clinics treating tens of thousands of patients on an annual basis for decades.
I have spoken with them and the number of patients who have had a panic attack more than 90 minutes ever.
I'm gonna go for the same answer.
It's zero. How about the number of people who have crashed their car during a panic attack?
It doesn't happen. The number of people who've gotten up in the middle of a plane and started running around and stabbing people with the plastic fork.
Listen, I'm gonna save maybe at least one.
I've seen some weird current videos, but it probably is zero.
Well, there was that one time.
No, I'm kidding. The answer is zero.
People don't do that.
When you're anxious, you're actually more in control of yourself.
You're dealing with your own emotions.
And often you can't even tell.
Like people say like everyone can see I'm anxious.
No, they're looking at themselves.
They're not looking at you.
What is it called? The spotlight effect?
Everything that we do seems to be like super, super obvious to other people, but we're all in our kind of own internal lives and internal minds.
That's really interesting because I think that that's a really important reminder to people who experience kind of the shame cycle of like, this is super embarrassing.
The one thing I do and I is really similar to you is like I tell myself I'm excited by the feeling because I think anxiety and excitement feel very, very similar.
So I'm like, this is the most exciting feeling ever.
It's actually the same chemical.
It's adrenaline. A general and a happy different.
Those are the chemicals that are secreted when we're excited and when we're anxious.
Yeah. So you can just tell yourself that it's something different.
So anxiety is obviously incredibly limiting at times can feel somewhat like a life sentence, but what I really, really love about your work is that it kind of offers this more positive alternative to this perspective.
You know, seeing anxiety, not so much as a supercell, you know, per se, but kind of you say this as your own personal confidence to kind of learn your limits.
So can you expand on that a little bit?
What is anxiety useful for?
How can we listen to anxiety as a way to kind of teach us more, not just about our environment, but also about ourselves?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think for people in their 20s especially, I want to go back to the conversation about loneliness and the people I know, the patients I know who've had anxiety have the ability, you know, I would call it a superpower to understand and to probe and to respond to the emotions of other people much better
than people who don't, who aren't, I would say blessed with anxiety, especially social anxiety, you know, people who are excessively shy, excessively socially anxious, can pick up on incredible cues like facial changes in the facial expression or changes in voice intonation or in rate of speech in people's
body language. The specific words that they pick up on are much more nuanced and that can enhance our connection with others.
Now they might have a smaller group of friends, they might not be life of the party and have 500 or 100 people or whatever it is, but those intimate connections, if we use our anxiety to understand the emotional experience of others, it can make us into a much better friend and more importantly, let
me ask you a question, are you closer with people who you divulge intimate emotional details of your life to?
Yeah, absolutely. I think.
Yeah, I think but also on a selective level, I think when you do that excessively, sometimes it actually puts the relationship at risk.
That's a fair point.
But when we have one or two friends who we can really cry on their shoulder and open up to them and say, Hey, I'm having a hard time.
Like, I really, I really need your love, your support, your hug right now.
Like, when we can be vulnerable in those relationships, that's it's so critical.
It's such a critical human need to be able to express our vulnerabilities.
And anxiety, I think is one of the things that gets us there when they're feeling anxious, and we reach out and get the love and support we need.
Those can be the best relationships that we'll ever have.
I agree. I 100 % agree.
It's interesting because we talk about friends, but perhaps, you know, divulge even more about myself on this episode, you've made me open up.
You know, the relationship that I actually see that has benefited from that the most is the relationship with my dad, because my dad has, I think, he has really, has long struggled with anxiety.
And I think I didn't realize that as a kid.
And, and now I've realized, I've realized it more, you know, when I was a teenager, now into my 20s, where I'm like, Ah, this is a shared experience.
And I can tell when my dad is, more ready to open up to me in a way that I think a lot of Australian men really aren't because of the cultural cultural milieu here, like, you know, it's the sunburnt country, you mentioned, just go out and make a fair go for yourself and work really hard for your family.
And it's, you know, got that whole like, convict mentality.
That's how we were colonized, obviously history lesson for everyone.
But I think the thing like the times that I've understood him the best is when we've been able to bond over that, that experience.
And also, he's come, you know, he's been able to open up to me and been like, this is, you know, I'm having this, this anxious feeling.
And let's connect on that, and get through it together.
So I do think it's definitely helped my relationship with my dad, and there's probably not a relationship he had with his father at all.
And the same I could probably say about my mom, and now my sisters as well.
So I actually think that's really fascinating.
That point, you're telling me that the fact that you experienced anxiety, you were able to recognize it in your father, get him to open up about it despite cultural factors to the contrary.
And that has enhanced your bond and your relationship.
I'm giving myself too much credit.
I think that he was doing his own work.
Yeah, I think that there was like a moment.
I also think it was necessitate it was like there was it was by necessity whereby, you know, he's a parent.
I'm not a parent. But I'm sure that when he was seeing me experience that pattern of symptoms, he was like, recognized himself in that.
And I don't know, probably really wanted to comfort me and then really share like I've, I've been through the same thing.
Maybe he didn't have a word for it.
He came with me to my sessions, you know, it's like that whole process.
But that's exactly what Thrive and with anxiety is about you, you, you and him have used anxiety to connect with each other.
And that's what it's here for.
I mean, it's not have you, you know, if you only medicated away without also engaging therapy and also engaging with your father about it, it would have been a tremendous opportunity missed.
And I think many times that's what happens.
And people are just left more alone, more anxious, more upset about the fact that they're anxious.
And I'm seeing a lot of pain and a lot of isolation, a lot of just loneliness in our world because of we don't realize that anxiety is so normal and something that we can use for positive if we use the right techniques.
So that kind of leads me to my last question.
You have a book coming out tomorrow.
By the time people are listening to this, you will be able to get your hands on it.
I have my hands on this book, but if not, I would be buying an extra copy.
I think it's going to be a Christmas present for a few of my close family and friends, maybe my dad that you talk about these nine tools to make anxiety work for you.
Not to give everyone a sneak peek, but can you maybe discuss maybe some of the most relevant ones you think would apply to people specifically in their 20s for who anxiety is definitely an everyday reality.
The most relevant piece of information in the book is that our cultural tendency to try to squelch and get rid of our anxiety is not helpful.
It is A, not going to happen.
You will never get rid of all your anxiety.
B, the more you try to get rid of your anxiety, the worse it comes back.
Anybody who's done cognitive behavior therapy knows this one, that if you don't accept it and if you don't let yourself feel it, then it's just going to make it worse.
C, most importantly, anxiety can teach you a lot about your own thoughts, about your own feelings.
It can allow you to have more resilience that when you feel uncomfortable, it's not that anything else is, it's not that everything is going wrong.
It's not that there's something that catastrophes about.
That's called having a human tapestry, a rich tapestry of human emotion.
Like we spoke about with you and your dad, you can parlay that into our relationships.
Perhaps most important for your generation, a lot of people are very ambitious today.
If you're going to pursue your dreams, you are going to hit stress, you are going to hit struggles, you are going to feel anxious.
The more we can learn to experience and allow ourselves to experience anxiety, the better positioned we are to truly accomplish our unique goals and dreams in this world.
That's kind of a summary of the book in, I don't know, was that 10 sentences or 10?
I think so. Pep talk, I didn't know I needed.
Feels like that was, that was hand selected for me.
I want to say thank you so much for coming on.
One final question.
What do you think is the current biggest misconception about anxiety in this generation?
I believe we have construed anxiety as a disease, as a malady, and yes, of course it can get disordered in certain cases and excessive to the point that it becomes debilitating, but one of the primary reasons why we're doing that is because we don't embrace it, we don't understand that this is part
and parcel of our humanity.
We are limited finite creatures in a very complex world and if we're going to feel overwhelmed and stressed and anxious at times, well, guess what?
That means you're we don't have that perspective.
And when we start to accept and understand this is part of life, we can use it, I think we can use it for good.
I really do think we can use it for good.
I'm hoping that everyone is listening loud and clear to that.
I think I agree with that.
I want to say thank you so much for coming on and I'm super excited about your book.
I want to really plug it to the listeners here if you, if you have an interest, it looks amazing.
I think that if you love this podcast, it's evidence -based, you're going to love this book as well.
So thank you so much, Dr.
Rosman, for coming on the show and for joining us for this conversation.
Thanks for having me.
What an honor and a pleasure to meet you.
Absolutely. Anytime.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode.
If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now.
If you have an episode suggestion, you can follow me at that psychology podcast, or if you have something to say about this episode, we'd love to hear it.
So get in touch and we will be back next week for another episode.
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